Chaotic crow search enhanced CRNN: a next-gen approach for IoT botnet attack detection

Internet of things (IoT) botnet attack detection is crucial for reducing and identifying hostile threats in networks. To create efficient threat detection systems, deep learning (DL) and machine learning (ML) are currently being used in many sectors, mostly in information security. The botnet attack categorization problem is difficult as data dimensionality increases. By combining convolutional and recurrent neural layers, our work effectively addressed the vanishing and expanding gradient difficulties, improving the ability to capture spatial and temporal connections. The problem of weight decaying and class imbalance affects the accuracy rate of the existing DL models. In convolutional neural network (CNN), fully connected layer optimizes the hyperparameters by utilizing its comprehension of the chaotic crow search method. The chaotic mapping maintains equilibrium between the global and local search spaces. The crow's strategy for hiding food is the main source of inspiration for optimizing the learning rate, weight, and bias components involved in the prediction process. When compared to other existing algorithms, the UNSW-NB15 dataset's results for IoT botnet attack detection in the presence of a high degree of class imbalance demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) boosted with chaotic crow searching algorithm, which produced the highest detection rate with the lowest false alarm rate.